Applied AI Engineer

Outsmart is a mission-driven, early-stage startup reimagining higher education for the age of AI by creating an entirely new collegiate experience that expands access and opportunity. Backed by $38M from top venture firms including Khosla Ventures, Forerunner, DST Global Partners, and Lightspeed, the company is led by former Duolingo executives and a founding team that also includes Emmy Award winners. With a strong culture centered around high-impact, detail-oriented team members, Outsmart is already seeing significant traction, generating 1–5 million weekly organic views on social media.

About the Role

In this role, you’ll be at the forefront of the machine learning that powers Outsmart’s applications. As an early member of the engineering team you’ll play a critical role in setting the tone for Outsmart’s technical culture including setting standards for algorithmic quality and scalable ML. You will work on both generative and discriminative use cases, focusing on content generation at scale, gamification, benchmarking and analytics, and multi-modal behavior classification from mobile signals.

Qualities we are seeking

• Craftsmanship and Extreme Ownership
• Open-mindedness
• Frequent, direct, honest, kind communication
• Demonstrable adoption of AI in all aspects of work
• Track record of shipping in an environment of high-performance
• User obsession

Responsibilities:

• Define ML/MCP stack
• Own prompting standards across the engineering team
• Define and enforce ML benchmarks for all ML applications
• Work with Product and Engineering leadership to define ML roadmap
• Own end-to-end deployment and maintenance of ML systems
• Work with backend to define and enforce schemas/data models which will facilitate ML development

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years experience in hands-on ML role
• Deep and proven experience with ML and MLOps tooling and techniques
• Experience shipping ML-first applications at scale
• Strong background in statistics–specifically for ML
• Ability to own fullstack work in order to unblock ML initiatives
• Ability to work autonomously in a fast‑paced environment

Perks

• Competitive salary and equity
• Healthcare for you and your dependents (medical, dental, and vision)
• Parental leave for any full-time employee who has been with us for at least 6 months (birthing, non-birthing, and adoptive parents)
• 10 PTO days per year, a winter break, and 12+ paid company holidays per year
• Remote work days
• Lunch provided in-office daily
• Working with super talented people who want to make a difference in the world

Salary Range:

*Outsmart is committed to building an equitable and inclusive workplace and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants for employment regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.*